Up to 48 million Twitter accounts are bots, study says

Between 9 percent and 15 percent of tweets come from fake accounts, according to new research.

Photo by LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images

Someone just liked your tweet. Someone else followed you. Do you know them? No?

They could be among the 48 million bots on Twitter, according to study released last week by the University of Southern California and Indiana University.

The study, which used a system leveraging more than 1,000 features to identify bot accounts on the site across six categories, estimated that between 9 percent and 15 percent of Twitter's 319 million active monthly users are bots.

This is almost double of Twitter's bot estimate. A Twitter spokesman declined to comment Tuesday other than to point to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Feb. 27. In the filing, Twitter restated its previous estimate the 8.5 percent of its monthly active users are automated accounts. According to Twitter, just over 27 million of its accounts are bots.

The university researchers actually suggested that the 15 percent figure is a "conservative estimate" given the sophisticated nature of more complex bots, which could have been incorrectly identified as humans.

This is not the first time that Twitter has come under the spotlight due to bot accounts. A study from the University of Southern California last year found that 19 percent of election-related tweets made during the study's period were from bot accounts.

First published, March 14 at 1:26 a.m. PT.Correction, 5:20 a.m. PT: The calculation of the number of potential bot accounts has been fixed.Update, 9:05 a.m. PT: Twitter's response has been added.

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